I had the opportunity in February to go to the ECHO agricultural conference in Arusha, Tanzania. You might remember that I went to an ECHO conference in Florida in 2013. ECHO has centers around the world and the one in East Africa is located in Arusha. Every other year they have a conference there too. It was a very enjoyable conference and I think that I learned a lot that will help me with my work in Uganda now and hopefully in whatever work I do in the future. I appreciated that this conference was focused on East Africa as a region, so all of the speakers and topics were relevant to the context where I work.
One of the fun aspects of the conference was meeting up with a lot of people I know from around the region. Many of our colleagues from World Renew in Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania were there and also people who work for organizations that partner with World Renew. I also got to see a former fellow intern from Texas, Geoff, and both of us stayed with our friend Neil (also formerly from World Hunger Relief) and his family. It was great, even though there was no water at Neil's house during the time we were there!
Neil was also a speaker at the conference, on the topic of conservation agriculture and green manure/cover crops (gm/ccs). I've talked about these before, but just as a reminder, they are plants that keep the soil covered during the dry season or in between your main crop, and which add organic material to the soil. You can see Neil speaking below:
I heard about a lot of different ideas for intercropping different gm/ccs with each other and with main crops and I am hoping to try some of those things out in my own garden when the rainy season starts again. I also learned some good ideas for what to look for as indicators of success in an agricultural development project, which will enable me to better help our partner organizations, KIDO and KMDP, as they write project proposals.
Another really interesting session was about motivation for change in development. The speaker made the point that trying to do development in sub-Saharan Africa without basing it on a religious worldview (like using the Bible) is neo-imperialism. What he was saying, was that since a large percentage of Westerners have a secular worldview, they tend to think that this is the most appropriate way to approach development. But if they come to Africa, to a place where the majority of people have a Christian worldview, and try to impose a secular idea of development on people whose worldview is Christian, it is very similar to the attitude of colonialism and imperialism. It was very thought-provoking.
He also discussed the difference between incentive and motivation for doing something. Money is an incentive to make people change temporarily. But when the money is gone, the motivation to continue with a project has to come from somewhere else. For example, if a person is a Christian, they want to serve and obey God, so obedience to God's commands in the Bible is good motivation for that person to change or to do a certain thing.
On the final day of the conference, a Masai choir sang before dinner. They were excellent singers and very beautiful!
So overall, it was a very good learning experience. I learned much more than I shared with you in this post, but I don't want to bore anyone with too many agricultural details :)
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